


alone, together.

by hooksandheroics



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Drabbles, F/M, One-Shots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2018-02-19 19:52:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2400869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hooksandheroics/pseuds/hooksandheroics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of drabbles and prompts posted on Tumblr; from the beginning of season 3B to the current episode, ranging from AU to canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Umbrella Drabble

**Author's Note:**

> Ratings may vary.

Storybrooke always has unpredictable weather.

She is at the station, finishing a couple of long and dragging paperwork for two minor ‘breaking and entering’ cases when the sky decided to cry on her. A quick look around the small station tells her that there is no way she can get home dry, so she slumps on her desk chair and sighs.

If this rain continues just like yesterday, she can get home around seven, have cold and stale Chinese for dinner and then maybe just lie down on her bed until she falls asleep. Her mind wanders to her son, the week he’s going to spend staying at Regina’s – oh God, Regina. Don’t even get her started on Regina’s ice-cold treatment towards her.

She sighs again, rests her forehead on her desk and listens to the downpour outside because that’s all she can do at the moment when she has no shield against the heavy rain.

Her phone buzzes and rattles against the hard wood of her desk, startling her out of her reverie. She reaches out and finds that it’s from _Killian_. She bites back a smile.

Ever since the whole ‘Back to the Future’ debacle, ever since… well, ever since _them,_ it’s been easy to find a smile within small moments like this when it’s raining and she’s in mortal peril and he’s obviously concerned enough to bother with what he had called a ‘faster but decidedly more outrageous version of a telegram’.

_You’re at the station?_

Yes. Where are you?

_I am coming over._

She knits her brows together, searching around her brain for an answer to her question because apparently, her pirate is being cryptic. When she left this morning, a toast between her teeth, shrugging her jacket on while talking to David and balancing her phone between her cheek and her shoulder, she had watched him stir the black coffee in his mug wearing _nothing_ but his sweatpants, had appraised her with his eyes as he sipped, vaguely heard him mutter something about going to the docks to help do… something.

Oh, so, he was at the docks.

She hopes to God he’s at least –

Her thoughts were cut off by a loud rattling on the station’s entrance, so ominously loud she reaches for her gun from under her desk. The rattling continues and her heart thuds against her chest heavily, a tendril of terror slinking around her ribcage as she bustles around her brain for any indication as to who this person might be, and most importantly, their purpose. She is halfway through the corridor when she sees the shadow of a man behind the frosted glass of the door, and heard the clicking of the lock. Her heart jumps, her gun raises, the door opens, and then –

“Bloody hell.”

The tension leaves her in a rush when she sees familiar blue eyes, bright even with the shadow cast by the dark skies, jet black hair wet and matted against his forehead, a grimace on his unfairly attractive face. It’s him, albeit a bit waterlogged.

“You scared me,” she exclaims, dropping her arms to her side as she takes a few steps forward to reach him. That’s when she registers how wet he actually is because there’s not a spot on his shirt and jacket that’s dry, his boots squeaking (she can only imagine how unpleasant that is), his teeth chattering, his skin a bit pale. “What were you doing – were you bathing in the rain?”

“No,” he replies, his lower lip visibly trembling, she notices his vice grip on an umbrella – her black umbrella, still folded neatly, and then she sighs. She grabs his face between her warm palms, pursing her lips in an expression that’s a mix of confusion, amusement, and disbelief.

“Come on, let’s get you dry,” she says with a small smile.

Not a minute later, he’s shucked off his shirt and jacket, his jeans, and his boots, leaving him only in his boxer shorts and a blanket wrapped around him – adorably, she might add, because it truly is a sight to see when a fearsome pirate is bundled up under an enormous light blue blanket with a mug of hot coffee in his hand. She tries to stifle a snicker as she sits across from him, he on the couch, and she on the desk chair. She schools her expression into that of indifference because she needs to be stern for this.

(The likeness of this situation to that of scolding a small child is not lost on her.)

“Are you gonna tell me what you were doing running under the rain?” she says, and she tries to inject as much disappointment in her tone as possible because she’s still finding this sight particularly hilarious.

He peers at her behind the mug as he chews on his bottom lip – and seriously? She can take flirty, deliciously dark, innuendo-laden pirate, but this wide-eyed puppy is a line crossed too far.

“I was at the docks,” he starts, staring at the mug as if it’s an ancient wonder. “It started raining.”

“I’m sure there’s a shed there somewhere,” she says, fixing him with an incredulous look. “And you _have_ my umbrella.”

His eyes cast down at that and it makes her wonder even more.

“I didn’t,” he says, and the way he said it sounds like a confession. “It – ah – started raining, and then I remembered you left this in the apartment and I thought you needed it…”

Realization dawns on her and squeezes sweetly in her chest. “You ran back to get it?” she whispers, and she does not need to ask to know, but it’s her surprise that pushes the words out of her mouth.

“I didn’t know how to open it, I was – I – you had no shield against the rain –

She is standing from her chair, dropping down on her knees in front of him in a flash, grabbing his face in her palms, and crashing their lips together. He makes a stifled groan that rumbles in his chest, but he relaxes immediately. He bends to put the mug down on the floor, not breaking the kiss as if her heat is the breath to his lungs.

She can’t believe this man, can’t believe he would trudge through the rain, the cold, retrieve her umbrella, and then run back to the station just because he _thought_ she needed it.

He moves, sucking and biting and nipping at her lip as if he couldn’t get enough of her. There will always be an underlying heat in everything he does – in kissing her, holding her hand, playing with her hair, smiling at her – and she loves it.

She does.

And she loves him, too.

She does, she really does, and she’s held off on saying the words for far too long now when she knows she had fallen in love with him the moment he followed her into the time portal. And it’s true: her heart knew before it had even reached her brain, but it does not matter, not when the feelings had only culminated when he decided that today is a good day to be an idiot and run through the downpour and get her an umbrella. (This is ridiculous, he’s ridiculous, but God damn her if she decides to shove this little moment away as if it were nothing.)

Her fingers are threading through his still wet hair, her other hand tracing the line of his jaw, when she pulls away and breathes the words against his parted lips. There’s a silent moment, a moment so still it feels like an eternity. The hand that’s playing with her hair had frozen, his breathing had stilted. But when he grins and asks her to _say it again, Emma, say it again_ , she caves and says it again. And again. In between kisses, fluttering touches of lips, against his cheek, his nose, his neck, his jaw, and then back to his lips. But they cannot kiss properly, not when he’s grinning, not when he can’t keep that smile out of his face (and _maybe_ she’s smiling, too, but his is wider, brighter – oh God).

He returns the words when they’re already at the apartment, when he pushes her against the door and kisses her again even with her coat half-shrugged off, the wet umbrella landing on the floor with a muted clank.

It seems like Storybrooke’s weather is not the only thing that’s unpredictable today.


	2. A Thousand Suns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When you find true love after 'death do us part', and you were given an eternity of a thousand suns to spend, would you take it? (Ghosts in Love AU from Tumblr)

It’s the fall right after her funeral when she meets him.

He was sitting under the lone oak tree in the middle of the graveyard, head tilted up, staring at the spaces between the leaves. Oddly enough, she had found that finding out that he is just like her wasn’t as surprising as finding him.

He regarded her with a peculiar gaze, something akin to awe and relief etched on the rings of blue in his eyes. His hair is dark, dancing with the strong winds, his hands buried under his thighs.

“You’re still here?” he had asked.

“Where else would I be?” she had replied, for she knew nothing about how this works.

He had grinned at her and the blush that had creeped up on her skin was something she had troubles in hiding. His name is _Killian_ , hers is _Emma_.

He, after his thirty years of living, has a lot of stories to tell. Of voyages on ships (“the sea is in my blood, love, there’s nothing I can do about it”), and women falling head over heels in love with him (he says it with a waggle of his brows, and she couldn’t help the amused chuckle that escapes her), of his brother, and his love. So when he asks her one of hers, she couldn’t deny him.

“So what’s your story?” he asks one summer day as they sit on top of his grave. The breeze whispers around them, warm and soft, and it reminds her of one of the greater things in life. For an orphan like her, something like this can be the most exquisite privilege. She never told him that.

“Story?”

“How you ended up here,” he supplies, picking on the crack on the concrete.

She tells him of a car accident last spring, of how unexpected it was, of how she had been on her way back home after a long day at work. He looks at her and the emotions behind his eyes swallow her up like a whirlpool. A pang of pain shoots in her chest as tears begin springing at the back of her eyes. “You?” she asks in return.

“I… I went to sleep one night and I woke up here.”

“You don’t remember?”

He drops his gaze on the unkempt and uncared for splotch of soils around his grave. “I do. I was… my brother had just died… Milah – my – she… left. I… literally died of a broken heart, Emma.”

If she leans over and touches her lips with his, if she kisses him because there’s much more to him than his stories could ever tell, if she threads her fingers through his hair, well, she doesn’t care anymore.

* * *

 

They are sitting on Mr. Olson’s grave (his favorite grave because it’s obsidian and embossed in gold, and it has his favorite quote on it: _I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. – Mark Twain_ ) when he asks, “Do you think we’ve met before?”

His voice is quiet in the mild gusts of the afternoon as it blows past them. The layers in his query digs in her heart – that if they had met in the past, would they have still felt the same way they do now? That if their eyes had met once, would they still have been as close as this?

She imagines an afternoon in the library, eyes meeting through the spaces between leaning, misplaced books on a dusty shelf – green and blue – a smirk and a coy smile. She smiles to herself because it could have happened, she might have forgotten it, but it could have happened and that moment could be their first meeting.

“We’re in the same yard, aren’t we?” she replies with a small grin in her lips. “Maybe in the library, or in the supermarket down 5th?”

“I don’t buy anything from there,” he shakes his head and meets her gaze, a whisper of a grin tugging at his lips. “I’d rather buy from the shop down 7th.”

She laughs at that. “They have blue jello there.”

“Exactly!” he exclaims, and the lightness in his tone makes him sound like a little boy. “They have blue jello there.”

* * *

 

 No one ever told them that when you’re dead, you don’t see the night, only the day. So when the sun glazes over them to the west and slides up from the east, she finds herself facing an eternity of a thousand suns.

She glances over to where he’s standing, and he gives her an apologetic smile.

“Do you know why we’re here, Emma?”

“No.”

“I’ve seen it so many times in the past,” he says, staring at the flower left on one of the graves near hers. She finds him almost all the time like this, staring at the bouquets left on every grave they walk upon. There’s something sad and painful in the way he stares – later, she finds the name to it: longing. “Ghosts, they stay here until someone cries on their graves. Or until someone brings them flowers. We’re still here because no one wants to visit us. Orphans don’t exactly get the privilege of family visits.”

She takes his hand and squeezes it in hers. He raises his head and finds the small grin plastered on her lips. “So we’re stuck here.”

“We are,” he nods. They stay like that for a long time, letting the wind blow against them.

“Until?”

“I don’t know.”

When she was a little girl, she kept a notebook where she tallied her days in a new foster home. She would count until counting seems pointless, she stopped when hope had drained from her little heart. She had stopped counting the days in here, too, not even sure when she had ended. But not because of the same reason.

“Have you ever been in love?” he asks. And when he turns to meet her eyes, she finds that there’s hope in even the strangest things.

“No, I haven’t,” she replies, giving him a soft smile. “But I think I’m beginning to.”

She considers the possibility that she’s exactly doing that as she faces another sunrise with him.

And it’s strange, and odd, and peculiar, because she has never in her entire living life had ever fallen in love. But she finds that in the moment when her heart had stopped beating had she found a reason for it to be. And it’s okay, people don’t exactly get the opportunity to spend an eternity together like they do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy and comment, or leave a kudos, if you see fit. :)


	3. The Nightmare Drabble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lifetime of pain and loneliness will not be erased with just a kiss and a promise of love. But they're working through it together. That's what's important.

When she wakes that night, it is not because of a movement (for he moves like a feline, stealthy and silent), but because of an absence.

Emma Swan had reveled on cold sheets and empty beds on nights when she expected them to be, when she found that being alone was the best thing for her, when she was so naïve and so heartbroken and so lonely. She had accepted long ago that her fate was just that—to be alone for the rest of her life. And for a long, long while, she was alright with it.

That was until a little boy showed up at her apartment door and begged for her to _come home with him_.

Since then, she still slept on a bed alone, but not without the knowledge that somewhere down the hall, or just in the other room adjacent to hers, there’s someone there who’s willing to pull her from her nightmares whenever she has one.

Her palms smooth out the rumpled sheets beside her, biting her bottom lip, deep in thought.

This has been going on for a while now. Not consecutively, but so often that she’s starting to feel a feeling of dread in her gut that she couldn’t shake until he comes back to bed. In the morning, the dread is gone and it does not return… that is until he does it again.

It’s always in the middle of the night, when sleep has claimed her, when he decides to get up and lock himself in the bathroom. And then she would wait until he comes out from there with a shaky breath and a hand running through his dark and messy hair, and she would pretend to be asleep until he’s settled under their blanket. She would then wrap an arm around his bare torso and pull him closer to her, that feeling of dread dissipating until it’s nothing but a whisper of doubt that’s easily discarded as a residue of a dream.

Tonight, the feeling of dread is stronger, a pull on her stomach that has her swinging her legs down the edge of the bed, feet reluctant on their padding through the small space between the bed and the bathroom door. She inhales deeply and puts her ear to the light door, straining her hearing until she hears something…

A choked sob sounds from inside and her heart lurches to her throat. It was muffled as if he’s trying so hard to reel in the sound from escaping his system. There’s a quiet pounding on the ceramic sink, and then the faucet is turned on. The running water might have cancelled all the other sounds, but his heavy breathing is still audible.

She steels herself and clutches at the door knob, turning it and pushing the door open until she sees his hunched back and the outlines of his knuckles gripping the edge of the sink so tight she’s afraid it might break.

His head snaps up and his eyes meet hers through the mirror, and there is fear and guilt and terrible sadness in them that she feels them in her heart like spikes. He swallows hard and opens his mouth to explain, but she is already behind him, wrapping her arms around his torso, putting her ear on his cold skin, hearing his breathing and erratic heartbeat. Whatever it is that’s bothering him (she has a pretty good idea what it is), she feels him trying to even out his breathing, trying to relax in her arms. His good hand caresses the skin of her arm, and then he’s turning in her embrace to face her fully, dropping his forehead to hers, closing his eyes. She reaches up to run her fingers through his disheveled hair, and then trail them down his cheek and then his jaw and then finally, on his chest just above his heart and he exhales, the tension seemingly leaving him.

There is a moment of silence where she just enjoyed the fact that his breath is fanning over her face, and that his heart is beating.

“Tell me about them,” she asks quietly, and when he shifts in her hold, she pulls him even tighter.

He meets her gaze once more, his lips pursed in a tight line, his jaw set and tensed, and she could feel the way he curls in on himself, a protective wall around him. And knowing him, it’s probably because he wants nothing in this relationship to be completely about him, only about her, and she loves him for it, really. _But that’s not how it works._

“It’s nothing,” he says in a low whisper and shakes his head. “Let’s go back to bed.”

He tries to pull away from her, but her embrace only tightened around him, an anchor that sets him in place. Whatever it is that he’s not telling her, whatever is hurting him is hurting her, too, and it might just be because they’re too alike that she knows—she just knows—that he’s spent too long alone that it’s almost impossible to erase all the deep-set loneliness, but they have to try.

“No,” she says, and she’s impressed by the tone of her voice because her resolve isn’t as concrete. “Please, tell me.”

And it is her soft plead that pulls him back to her and the matter at hand. His eyes—oh God, his eyes, they shine with unshed tears and it pulls at her heart the weight of the loneliness in them. He doesn’t speak, does not move, not until his real name spills from her lips in a desperate whisper.

“My mother always said, she always told Liam and I,” he starts, and his voice cracks at the first words, but he manages, and this sort of courage in him makes her heart flutter in her chest. His stare is distant and detached, as if the memories are really passing in front of him in vivid detail. “…that the dreams that we have when we sleep at night are what we truly are deep inside.

“I didn’t know how horrible that thought was at that time because we were just lads, untainted, until I…” he takes a deep breath and his embrace tightens around her. “Until I dreamt of dark places. After Liam died. After Milah.”

His gaze then returns to her, hardened and strained. “In my dreams, I’m alone. I always end up alone, no matter how happy I am in my waking hours.”

Heavy silence falls around them. She lays her head on his chest and lets herself drown in the sound of his heart beating against his ribcage, soft and steady and alive.

He takes a deep breath in and rests his cheek on the top of her head. His fear is unspoken, but it lodges in her chest like a blunt spike, and she clutches at his shoulders as if the impact is physical. She feels tears threatening to spill from her eyes because he should know, he should very well know, that he brought her home in every sense of that phrase, and that he is hers, and he is loved.

She reaches up to cup his face, her thumbs resting on his cheeks as she wipes at the tear stains there. She caresses his scar and lingers for a moment, before pulling him down for a kiss so tender it makes her heart melt. His lips part with a shaky sigh that almost sounds like a sob and it wracks his body, but she allows him. She owes him this, a moment of vulnerability, because all this time, he’s been her rock and she can always count on him to steady her whenever she needed it, and whenever she thought she didn’t but actually did.

“Never again,” she says against his lips and she feels the tension leave his body in a whoosh. He crushes her into another tight embrace, and she would care about the air leaving her lungs if she didn’t care more about the man hugging her. And boy, does she care more about him than anything right now. “I love you. Killian, I love you.”

He does not answer, only a soft whimper escapes his lips, but he does not need to say it.

She leads him back to bed and lets him hold her all night, and for every night since then.

The nightmares don’t stop immediately, but whenever he gets up, she pulls him back down with her arm around his chest and kisses him and his tears.

She is yet to see of a time that they completely stop, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t, because he now knows that there’s someone beside him that’s there to pull him from his nightmares whenever he has one.

**Author's Note:**

> Enjoy and review, if you see fit. :)


End file.
